


Tech Support

by doxian



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Feferi becomes Empress, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternia, Awkward Flirting, Bickering, Body Horror, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Developing Relationship, Gift Exchange, Helmsman, Helmsman Sollux Captor, M/M, Masochism, Mutual Penetration, Nooks Twofold, Porn With Plot, Psionics, Resolved Sexual Tension, Stalking, Technology, Trollstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-21 10:07:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1546889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doxian/pseuds/doxian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hi. Sollux Captor. You must be my engineer.” </p><p>“Hey. Divork Stridr, and good observation,” you take his hand and give it a few firm shakes. “Nice shades. Those to remind you what categories your psionics are in case you forget?”</p><p>There’s something about this kid that seriously bugs you – the sloppy, gives-no-fucks way he’s acting in the face of getting to be the Mothership's new helmsman at age nine, for instance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tech Support

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ShianneUrami](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShianneUrami/gifts).



> _I think the two of these boys would have a lot of potential for nice blackrom revolving around tech and one uping each other and sabotaging the other's work and making them improve. A nice healthy blackrom. Not much stipulation past that, but I think that'd work out well!_
> 
> This ended up more blackrom+tech than blackrom revolving around tech, but I hope you still like it. 
> 
> Warning for wires being inserted into the body, for casteist and ableist-like attitudes, for canon-typical ableist language and mentions of blood, death and stalking.
> 
> Troll Dirk's horns look like the ones on the bottom left of this (amazing) pic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brockhaus_and_Efron_Encyclopedic_Dictionary_b2_844-2.jpg 
> 
> Thank you to Aewin for suggesting that Sollux have two sets of psionics, and for listening to me blab about my ideas while I was brainstorming, and thank you to jadebloods for graciously christening Troll Dirk.

It's absurdly early in the evening when you receive the summons. There's nothing annoying about that in itself, although you know that the Chief Mechasurgeonabler must have picked this time in a paltry attempt to needle you. What _is_ annoying is that this is usually when you're up for your daily sword practice on the surface. It's one of the only times you can be assured of privacy in the Imperial Shipyard and Maintenance Compound, since nobody else has the self-discipline to be awake at this hour. Without a doubt, this means that Chief Durgas herself must have booted her snooty highblood ass out of her recuperacoon (with its custom sopor blend that matches her body chemistry perfectly, of course) extra early in order to make this meeting, which gives you a healthy, smug sense of schadenfreude about the entire thing. 

As for the actual summons itself – you weren't given any details aside from: it’s top priority, you’re not to reveal any details to your esteemed colleagues on pain of several days’ forced isolation in the pleasant and restful conservatories at the compound’s northern periphery, blah blah. But you're no stranger to snoopin’. You have your ways of keeping abreast of all the happenings here, and your mechanized, mobile ganderbulbs and hearbiscuits have informed you that a new helmsman has just been selected to power the Mothership. Frankly, this isn’t exactly a topic you really needed to scope out much information on, since everyone has been buzzing with gossip about the present helmsman reaching retirement age, but you’re nothing if not thorough.

And with the new helmsman comes a new engineer. The Mothership’s current engineer isn’t anywhere near retirement age, but had decided she wanted off the hoofbeastwagon, something about how after spending a lifetime on the same ship, tightening the same bolts and getting up close and personal with the same asshole’s spongestem for sweeps was more than enough for her. 

You have an inkling that you may well end up being the troll saddled with the honour next. You've been soaring up the ranks since you graduated from the training academy a couple of sweeps ago, and the fact that you were allowed to remain among your mostly-blueblooded peers in the first place despite your own umberblood status is near unprecedented. The heart of the matter is that you're simply the best there is. All signs point to you taking that post. 

You finish the walk to the tallest tower, smack in the center of all the other toilstems, ascend to the top floor via the bidirectional corpsecloset, and roll up to Mierfa’s office with a spring in your step.

* * *

You turn out to be right, of course. You hadn’t expected anything less from yourself, and would’ve thought that something had been amiss had you _not_ been given the job. 

As soon as you get back to your respiteblock, you pick up your huskpad and open up the new helmsman’s file, which is already sitting in your inbox. 

His name is Sollux Captor, and his psi class is higher than anything you’ve ever seen before. You don’t make it past his name, psi class, blood color (typical psionic yellow) and age (nine sweeps) before you find something that makes you pause and read it again. And again. He seems to have… two kinds of psionics? What? 

Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. He really does have two – one telekinetic and designated blue, and the other destructive – capable of razing entire hivestems to the ground – and designated red. It’s not out of the ordinary for a troll to have two or more types of psi at once – you recall studying such cases in order to understand the anatomical and neurological causes behind it - but the helmsmen you’ve dealt with before have always only had one. 

Mierfa had mentioned that there was an anomaly with his psi, but had conveniently dropped that juicy factoid when she was in the middle of showing you out, not giving you any time to grill her further. Your guess was that this was it. Bit of a huge goddamn oversight for her to not bring that to your attention. If you’d been in her position you would have mentioned that before absolutely anything else. 

It will be a challenge. That and the thought of being the first engineer to install and maintain a helmsman with dual psi of Captor’s caliber makes your bloodpusher pick up the pace a little. You’re so ready. You’re so ready to finally be shipped out and to get off the planet already. You’d become the best you could at dicking around here repairing totaled ships that came in, you’d been stagnating at that point for perigees now, and it’s high time you moved on.

You finish reading the file. The other downside you can see is he’s greener than Troll Hulk’s gamma radiation-enhanced shame globes. Barely even out of training. He might be a dizzyingly high-classed psionic, but it’s one thing to use psi in your own body, and another thing entirely to be part of a ship. It’s not exactly for everyone. (The latter thing, you mean.) 

All in all, you can only conclude that Mierfa’s decision means one of two things: the compound as a whole has even less of a clue what they’re doing than you originally thought, or this troll is really fucking brilliant. You’re talking apeshit bananas level of brilliant, here. 

Later, you find out that it’s both. 

* * *

Captor turns out to be a scrawny dipshit whose elbows are so bony-sharp he could probably slice you open with them. His teeth are a jagged mess, his clothes hang off him in two-digits-too-big sizes in expectation of a frame he’ll probably never grow into, and… you don’t know what he's going for with the two-tone motion picture projectioncube shades. It isn’t an irony thing. He doesn't look like the kind of guy who could recognize irony if the definition of it was spelled out for him in neon-bright writefluid on the insides of his shitty-looking glasses.

He slouches over to you and sticks out a hand. 

“Hi. Sollux Captor. You must be my engineer,” he sounds like he’s tiredly reciting words off of a cue card, like he needed to give himself a refresher schoolfeeding module in basic social niceties before venturing out of his cave of a respiteblock, which he looks to not have left in a few perigees, easily. Now that you’re getting a closer look at him you can see the wrinkles on his shirt and a shine to his hair that signals several ablutionsless nights.

“Hey. Divork Stridr, and good observation,” you take his hand and give it a few firm shakes. He’s shorter than you, the top of his head coming up to your sniffnode, probably. “Nice shades. Those to remind you what categories your psionics are in case you forget?”

He yanks his hand back and frowns at you, giving your own shades a really pointed look, but otherwise doesn’t respond. 

“You _are_ the new helmsman, right? You didn’t just wander into this repairblock on accident? It happens. I can hook you up with the rest of the programmediators if you’re lost.” 

You’re on a fucking roll. There’s something about this kid that seriously bugs you – the sloppy, gives-no-fucks way he’s acting in the face of getting to be the pilot at the forefront of the intergalactic protection missions at age nine, for instance.

“Yeah. No. Can you just hook me up already.” 

He floats over to the repair platform on a sparkling cushion of psi, and somehow even _that_ irritates you, the fact that he can’t just walk the few steps over there like a normal troll, even though literally every other psionic you’ve met does the same thing, uses their psi like an extra set of limbs, albeit an electro-endless set of them. 

You don’t say anything else to him, just walk over to the other side of the block and look over a few things pointlessly on your iShades to give him a little privacy. The handful of mechasurgeonablers assisting you have given you both a few curious looks while you were talking, but are otherwise busying themselves getting the last few pieces of equipment set up. Soon, Captor calls out and you turn around to find his clothes loosely bundled up in a pile with his shades resting on top, and him on the repair platform with the modestyplane pulled over him, ganderbulbs shut, like this ain’t even a thing, like he isn’t going to be full of new hardware when he next wakes up.

The anesthesia is ready to go. You place the gas mask over his sniffnode and squawk gaper, hold it in place.

“If you’re ready – breathe. This won’t hurt a bit.” 

He opens his eyes – the same solid red and blue as his shades, but way more startling – to give you a nod and one last glare before he goes under.

You don’t hear anything else out of Captor for a while.

You spend the better part of the night in the repairblock setting him up with the various ports and tubes he'll need in order to embark on his new life as a spaceship battery. By the time you’re done, your gloved hands are covered in goldenrod, and you run your fingers over the shiny new, evenly spaced ports in his torso pillar. It never gets any less satisfying to build something exactly to the specifications you were aiming for.

He spends the next few days recuperating, the nursetrolls keeping him knocked out and drugged up so he can’t feel any of the pain during the healing process. A decidedly normal amount of time for a yellowblood. 

Everything appears to be in order. 

* * *

You don't actually get to set foot in the Mothership’s helmsblock until Captor recovers. 

There isn’t an official announcement for when the ship is set to arrive, but somehow everybody seems to know the exact date. The crowd makes it a pain in the ass to get to the tramgrub that will take you to where it’s landed, and you’re thankful of the extra height you have on most of the other trolls as you shoulder your way past them. You can’t help but take a moment to pause and take the sight of it in, though – gigantic and awe-inspiring, the curve of its fins almost aggressive. It’s easily as big as any of the structures in the compound, or bigger, even.

There are several people you need to speak to once you finally get to the ship, so by the time you reach the helmsblock Captor is already there, and conscious again. 

He's seemingly unperturbed by how he is now peppered with holes. In fact, he appears to be almost excited as he leaps down from where he's hovering in the air when you enter the block.

“Wow, took you long enough.” The shades are gone, he’s wearing one of the regulation black-and-the-wearer’s-bloodcolor bodysuits instead of a shabby T-shirt and jeans, and he's fizzing with energy, red and blue bolts still flashing from his eyes as he makes his way to the helmscolumn without being prompted. A far cry from the ornery, reluctant troll you’d met the other week. He almost seems like a completely different person.

"C’mon, plug me in," he says to you, waggling his eyebrows at you like a huge fucking tool as he settles in amongst the thick, pearlescent cluster of biowires. 

"What, don't I even get a hello first?" You deadpan, raising a single eyebrow back at him. (You'd practiced the facial expression in the mirror enough for situations just like this that you can't _not_ do it.) You don’t exactly need to indulge his immature, dumbass comments, let alone respond to them, but whatever, you’re feeling generous tonight.

You can’t deny that you’re excited too, though. This is only a synchronization test, a mechanical dry run, but it’s your first step to getting in the sky. 

You slosh your way over to him, slowly padding through the pink fluid culture that the tentaclewires grow in. 

“Hold your hoofbeasts, I need to set this up first.” You open the husktop that you’d carried from the main control block and put it down, its six beetle-like legs popping out to stand it up in the liquid. He can’t stay still long enough to wait for you, floating up into the air again with a crackle.

“How are the new parts treating you?” You ask as you unfurl a cable from the husktop, feeling awkwardly around the base of the helmscolumn to locate the wires’ core and connect the cable to it. “Have you experienced any problems?”

“Nope,” he says, hovering obnoxiously over your crouched form like some kind of overgrown yellow-and-black insect. “Everything’s clean as a whistle. So clean it’d make the Her Imperial Benevolence’s personal chambertroll go, whoa, that’s one really clean whistle, what detergent do you use?” 

“Uh huh,” you say, somehow managing to make the two syllables sound critical. You stand up and gesture for him to get in position again, which he does. He isn’t in precisely the correct spot, so you take him by the shoulder and make to gently pull him so that he is.

“Okay, no, stop with the manhandling, just tell me where to put myself.” He bats your hand away.

You roll your eyes and direct him to put his arms at his sides, forearms held out slightly as if he were using the armrests on a swivel chair. The wires are already roping instinctively around his walkstems like a knot of overly friendly constrictor hissbeasts.

“Lean back and park your butt on that one behind you. Yeah, there. Like you’re leaning on the edge of a desk.” 

When he’s more or less arranged properly, you move behind him and sort through the tentaclewires, careful that your sloping horns don’t get stuck in them. Thinkpan first, then torso pillar. You grab one wire, which tries its best to coil lazily around your forearm, maneuver it so that its thin spine is exposed, and don't hesitate for a second before sliding the spine home into the matching port at the back of Captor’s head. He gasps. 

"That hurt?" You ask offhandedly. There’s usually a minimal amount of pain, but it should be bearable so long as you aren’t jostling a connection.

“Fuck no," he breathes. “It’s just weird.”

You do the rest one by one, methodically and unhurriedly, trying to focus on the order of the wires instead of the hitches in Captor’s breath every time you connect one. Doing this contents you in a similar way that installing the ports themselves did – it's a similar localized sense of control.

Finally, you’re done, and return to the husktop. Just the spine and thinkpan wires now – the ones for his arms and the rest of his body come after the first test. 

Captor is fidgeting neurotically under the wires that have wrapped around his arms and legs, so you check on him again. He insists that he’s fine. You give him a few moments to get used to the feeling of being integrated into the ship’s biotech, pulling up the testing program you need on the husktop and checking the settings. 

“Hey, you done over there?” He finally asks, impatiently. You take that as your cue and run the program.

“I’m ready if you are. You’re the one with the psi. Make it happen.” 

He nods at you again, like he did on the repair platform, eyes wide and a little frantic-looking this time before they fill with red and blue sparks. The energy accumulates and overflows around him, crackling spectacularly, making the entire helmsblock feel as though it’s filled with static.

It’s blindingly obvious that something is wrong, you can tell that much without even checking the screen. The energy shouldn’t be pouring from him like this – in fact you shouldn’t be able to see or feel anything it all. 

You need to actually yell and wave at Captor to get him to stop, and then you try it again, shift a few more variables and try it a few more times, and by the time you’ve figured it out you want to kick yourself, Mierfa, and the chumps back at the training facility for not guessing this would be a problem right from the get-go. 

“Stop. Stop! This isn’t going to work.”

“Okay,” he says, once he’s ground the one-troll firework display to a halt. “How many tests does it usually take before – ”

“It’s not working, period. You have two sets of psionics, and our systems only support one.”

“But the simulators at the facility – ”

“Were just fuckin’ simulators, they didn’t depend on you pretty much fusing with them to work.” You sigh, pushing your shades up and rubbing the bridge of your nose, then staring stonily at the screen with your shades still perched on top of your head as if that would give you any answers.

A gasping, bordering on choking noise rudely interrupts your thought flow. What the hell. Is he crying? 

You jerk your chin up to look at him and see him shaking with laughter, making the entire helmscolumn tremble with him like a bowl full of strawberry troll Jell-O.

“Holy shit,” he manages. You think there are actually yellow tears of mirth in the corners of his eyes and the slight lisp you noticed when you first met him is even more pronounced. “I knew it, I knew this was going to happen, I knew my ‘two’ thing was going to screw me over, so how soon do I have to get lost? Shall I get on the scuttlebuggy back to the facility now or wait till tomorrow?”

“Whoa.” You're beginning to feel a little insulted by his lack of faith in your abilities. “I can fix it.” 

“You can fix it,” he echoes. 

“Yeah,” you say, the skepticism in his tone making you summon up more bravado than you feel. “We just have to bifurcate the system, adapt it to fit you. Simple.” 

* * *

It’s far from simple. 

Your first fruitless task involves talking to Mierfa about it. Her reaction is to say that they all knew there was a chance Captor wouldn’t work in an actual ship. If it turns out that he isn’t compatible after all, the solution is simple: their second choice psionic, who isn’t very far behind in terms of skill, will take his place. There is no reason a lowblood like Captor should need to strain his delicate self so much, and the Empire has better things to sink its resources into than adapting their technology to an admittedly exceedingly rare type of psionic.

It’s the more rational option, for sure, but maybe it’s her blanket dismissal of your entire caste, maybe it’s that if you’re going to be engineer to the Mothership then you want to be servicing the very best, maybe it’s the implicit challenge in her saying that altering the system will be too much trouble to attempt, but your decision is final – you want Captor to be the one on that ship with you, and if that requires bifurcating the system, then that’s what you’re going to do.

Mierfa gives you a grand total of one month to do it. 

* * *

Over the next few nights, you become better acquainted with Captor’s head and back than any of your own body parts, and you hook him into and get him out of the helmscolumn so many times that he doesn’t even react to it anymore. You talk intermittently – it’s impossible not to while you’re shut up in the same room together for hours, but both of you can easily recognize you’re just about as brilliant as each other. You talk about nothing, about pointless shit, about videogames and movies and history and bits of pieces of your lives. Sometimes you listen to him bitch, sometimes he listens to you ramble about how you’re trying to create an AI inside your shades. 

When you aren’t running tests in the helmscolumn, you’re building parts in one of the repairblocks in the yard the Mothership is stationed at. You’ve unofficially taken the block over as your own – your computers and equipment are strewn all over it. Mierfa hasn’t spared you much help, but there are a few junior engineers you’ve been able assign some of the actual building to so you can free up more of your time.

The first snag – one of many, you’re sure – comes when you’re rewriting some of the programming. You’ve always been more adept at hardware over software. You’ve gotten to the point where you think you should be able to sync Captor’s two streams of psi with the program at least, if not with the ship as a whole, but for some reason it isn’t working. This puts you in a pointlessly pissy mood that leaves you terribly critical of pretty much everything, including Captor himself.

“You’re not controlled enough with your psi,” you snap at him while you’re packing up for the night. “You don’t need to be going that hard all the time. Once we’re spacebound you’ll use up too much energy too quick that way and it’ll suck, I guarantee you – for the rest of us, too. You’ll make it harder on the crew because we’ll need to compensate. Listen. I know of some decent exercises you could use to focus your energy more, I’ll give you the file tomorrow so you can get a head-start on learning them – ”

His eyes flash at you and he cuts you off with a snarl. 

“I’m sorry, have _you_ spent nine sweeps as a psionic? No." 

He’s right – you don’t have any psi to speak of, no mind powers whatsoever, not even the ability to commune with beasts, the skill that’s most typical to your hemotype. His psi is sparking quickly from eye to eye, the colors flickering back and forth, strobing in his agitation.

“So don’t talk to me about how best to use my psionics. You haven’t seen every type out there, not even in the academic footage you’ve watched, not even close. My control is fine. _Your_ problem, Stridr,” he’s floating closer to you, looking down at you from where he’s half a foot above you, “from what I’ve seen these past few weeks, is that you think you know better than everyone else when most of the time you really freaking don’t, you repulsive, insufferable prick.” 

He flies off, his psi leaving a sharp, angry ozone smell in his wake. Your face feels flushed and you bring a hand up to your cheek to feel its heat. 

* * *

The next time you see him isn't, surprisingly, in the helmsblock, but at the centre of the compound, on the surface. You haven’t spoken to him since you’d yelled at each other the other night.

It's barely past dusk and stripes of red-orange are still visible on the horizon against the deep purple of the rest of the sky. Some would consider it foolhardy to be outdoors this early since the rays of the sun haven't yet fully dissipated, but any troll who actually paid any attention to basic schoolfeeding would know that it's only the full-on rays that are dangerous.

He's hovering about two stories in the air next to a steep drop, contemplating the panorama of spires and translucent crystalglass that is the compound. A rare shard of sympathy for him stabs at your bloodpusher – you’ve seen how isolated and smotheringly restricted the psionic training facilities are. If you were in his position you'd probably be doing the same. 

You don’t acknowledge him and start your stretches instead, uncaptchaloguing your sword to set it beside you before doing some knee bends. 

You notice him notice you. You're cognizant of the exact moment, in fact, but you carefully don't react. He looks almost as annoyed as you feel, his eyes narrowing and one corner of his mouth quirking up in contempt. Welp, it's not like you're about to leave on his account – this is _your_ spot, and if your presence bothers him then that's merely a bonus. You turn your back on him and as you get on the ground to stretch your legs – bending one knee and stretching the other out. Doesn’t look like he intends to leave, either. 

You’re conscious of him looking at you, the sensation almost pricks at the back of your neck, but you continue to feign ignorance. You’re tempted to switch up your routine and do one of the stretches that highlights your physique better, but you don’t in favor of nonchalantly running through the motions, switching to the other leg, then standing back up and putting one arm across your chest, pulling it against you with your other hand.

It's pretty obvious that it's not the scenery that Captor is taking in anymore. He's sizing you up. You're about to say something appropriately dickish about how intently he's been watching you when he freaking zaps at you for no fucking reason – your flashstep is barely quick enough to transport you away from being barbequed.

Just as suddenly as he'd begun attacking you, he stops, letting his psionics fizzle out and his feet touch the ground. He walks to the edge of the chasm and sits perched on the edge of it, not looking at you. 

You're panting, more from the adrenaline rush than the exertion, and your hand is still on the hilt of your sword. If you were in his place, you'd have stopped just to mess with your head, but Captor is clearly not the mind game type. Were you merely not worth the time? 

Somehow this bothers you more than anything else could, kind of like when he was eager to completely write off the possibility that you'd be able to succeed at this “bifurcate the system” project you’re currently entrenched in. 

You're considering attacking him from behind even after he'd clearly backed off, but before you can –

“How do you do it?”

You reluctantly recaptchalogue your sword. You're mollified by the fact that he's still paying attention to you and not just ignoring you like you originally thought. 

“I can't explain the flashstep, dude,” you say, sitting down next to him, probably closer than you really need to. “You either have it or you don't.”

He snorts derisively. 

“No, fuckhead. How do you deal with it, being here surrounded by highbloods who treat you like you’re this fragile thing that’s about to fall over and break any second?” 

Oh. You shrug. 

“Honestly, being here is miles better than _not_ being here, even if highbloods can be smug assholes. It's their problem if they can’t deal with a couple of lowblood motherfuckers who could seriously mess with their shit if we wanted.”

You look at each other in the eye for a second, understanding passing between you.

“Some of them are cool,” you eventually continue, breaking his gaze. “You just have to look a little harder to find ‘em. And there are some other lowbloods here too, psionics passing through or programmediators, mostly.” 

“I’ll take your word for it, Divork.”

“Just call me Dirk,” you say. It had started out as a stupid nickname an old friend used for you. He’d mistaken the kind of sword you use and was entertained at how it sounded kind of like your name, said quickly. Somehow it had stuck. 

A few moments of silence pass, both of you looking out over the drop. You’ve been here at the shipyard for a sweep, which is long enough that it feels mundane to you, and you’d forgotten how coldly grand it can look. It definitely has that air now, thanks in part to the newly risen moon in the early evening sky and the halo of magenta light surrounding it.

“I think we should stop the project,” he finally says, quietly. 

“Dude.” Where the fuck had that come from? “No. We’re so close to making it work.” 

“We only have a week left. We should just stop, because – ”

“I’m not flushing this down the load gaper just because you’re having a weakslime moment of doubt. End of discussion.”

He barks a laugh at you. “Maybe it’s just not me! Maybe I’m not meant to be the Mothership’s new helmsman, maybe we should just accept that. I’ve seen it, it’s not how it’s meant to go for me, I end up blind and half-dead on a warped version of Alternia I don’t recognize, that’s how it has to happen – ” 

“ _Maybe_ ,” you interrupt him, “you should stop casting around for excuses and dwelling on your prophesized death that you seem to be so looking forward to. Do you even know what point in time that vision is from? Can the doomed voices tell you that?”

Your hands are in your lap and they’re shaking in anger, you can’t remember the last time you’ve been this genuinely angry. 

“You know they’ll probably just cull you, right? Fuck that. I’m not letting you waste your potential festering in a gilded, comfortable cage. You don’t get to, sorry, not when I know you’re better than that and can’t seem to stop pitying yourself long enough to notice.”

He’s giving you this incredulous look, like he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. You quickly run through what you just said and – wow, okay, you can understand the look, because apparently dumping your gross emotions directly into Sollux’s auricular sponge clots is a thing you do now. 

You get up and leave without giving him any time to respond, or yourself any time to blurt out anything else, and it's only after you've made it halfway back to your respiteblock that the thought occurs to you: you might have a blackcrush on Sollux fucking Captor.

* * *

You consider how your rapidly developing (read: in danger of careening out of control if you weren’t the type of dude who always kept a tight rein on your emotions) concupiscent feelings are not only somewhat professionally inconvenient, but totally illicit. In light of the new, peaceful way of life that Alternia had been introduced to back when you were a wriggler, the Empress had outlawed the entire hate-based half of the quadrant system, deeming the encouragement of violence unhealthy and not in line with the values of the new empire. The idea was that the ashen quadrant would then evaporate, since no one would be pursuing black relationships to begin with. More platonic mediation went around than you could shake a stick at, though, considering that plenty of trolls still experienced the wretched cesspool of feelings that being pitch for someone entailed. You’ve known some trolls to continue such relationships in secret – some of them got away with it, others were found out and rehabilitated.

You consider this state of things for about five timeticks before deciding you don’t give a single nugget of hoofbeast excrement whether this is illicit or not. 

You need to approach this strategically.

The first thing you do is read through all his files. Not just the ones belonging to the compound, you'd already read all of those. The files from his training facility, his medicaretaker. You trace a few handles connected to various hacker circles that you're fairly sure are his. You even go as far as to send one of your miniature surveillance bots after him to monitor his movements when he’s not at the helmsblock. 

Your plans fail epically: your husktop explodes without warning one night, and your spybot returns to your respiteblock, reprogrammed to cause absolute chaos, knocking shit off the shelves and divebombing you constantly, until you manage to slice it in half with your sword. 

The failures just make you want to try harder. Not just to accumulate any dirt on him you can, but to get him to seriously consider you as a potential rival. 

* * *

When he sees you in person, he doesn’t say anything about what you said to him on the surface, or about blowing up your electronics, but any ice that was left between you has melted, and you snip at each other with abandon, him sometimes really getting in your grill before backing off again. The waiting is nearly driving you up the wall, but it’s all part of the plan. And finishing the program takes priority right now, anyway. 

You end up enlisting his help in the repairblock since he seems to have a certain aptitude for software programming, and he lingers when the other engineers aren’t around, even when there’s nothing he needs to do. With just a few days left the two of you begin sleeping even less than you usually do already, staying in either the helmsblock or your commandeered repairblock deep into the day. 

Finally, it looks like it might possibly work. You’re stuck on one last hiccup, speechlessly frustrated that you can’t seem to make it past this last hurdle, when Sollux elbows you painfully in the ribs to get you out of the way, knocking to the puddled floor of the helmsblock. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” You ask indignantly, trying to get back up and push him aside, but he knocks you flat again with a burst of psionics, casually pinning you there while he works. You continue trying to move for a while before giving up and fuming silently, feeling the pink fluid seeping uncomfortably into your clothes.

There’s a release of pressure as he lets you up, and you wobble to your feet to look over his shoulder at the screen where the program is compiling.

The long wait is almost excruciating. Compared to the last month it’s no time at all, but the fact that you’re at the last push makes it feel much worse.

You actually leave to get proper food for lack of anything else to do, come back, and it’s finished. He climbs into the helmscolumn and you sort out the wires like you’ve done for him more times you can count, now. Then you stand back as he closes his ganderbulbs and tries it again.

No lightshow. Nothing seems to be happening until the entire helmsblock itself flickers with light, and the ship lurches, you can feel the floor shift under you hard enough to almost knock you off your feet and pitch you to the floor. 

You can hear him laughing again, but this time it’s jubilant, a little wild with relief, and you can feel yourself thrumming with adrenaline and grinning like a huge fucking dork as the motion calms down and the lights flicker out again. 

“Holy shit, Dirk, _holy shit_ – ”

“I’d say that phase one is a resounding success,” you say. “You ready to be installed properly?” 

“Hell yes,” he breathes, sounding just as blown away as you feel. 

“Alright.” Fuck. This is it. This is really it. 

You carefully step over the biowires covering the floor and get in front of him, running through the order in your head in an attempt to calm yourself down. You end up fumbling for the wire you need, both of you eager to get the second round of wires hooked up, but when you find it and pick it up your hands are steady. 

You take hold of his arm, searching for the first port, but then you're being pushed forward. You suddenly notice that your face is very close to Sollux’s face. You notice that your face is very close to Sollux’s face, and that the distance between you is lessening rapidly. 

Your mouths don’t so much meet as crash into each other, complete with one of his fangs digging painfully into your lower lip, splitting it and making it bleed. It would have been hot if it were intentional, but instead it just comes off as clumsy and dumb, and the hate bubbles and rises in your abdomen until you feel overwhelmingly full with it, so full it threatens to spill from your mouth like tar. 

His mouth is soft and wet, contrasting with the sharpness of his fangs. You can feel the edge of the fang that nicked you against your upper lip as he opens his mouth to you, and there’s no thoughtfulness, no technique, you can feel your blood and perhaps even your combined saliva trickling down your chin, and it’s disgusting, almost as disgusting as he is. What’s even more disgusting is just how much this is doing it for you, this toothy kiss and one of his hands in your hair and the tentaclewires coiled above you like some kind of perverse romantic canopy.

This was too soon. You meant to wait a little longer, get him properly set up as a helmsman, challenged him then, but he’s kicked that idea to the curb with this impulsive kiss. 

You’re just getting around to properly acquainting his tongue with yours when he pulls away. His psi crackles around you as he removes his focus from the ship to you, instead, pulling you closer to him. Now that you’re not distracted by your fury at being held down on the goddamn floor you can appreciate how it feels – warm, like small flames lashing against your skin. 

He tosses your shades off with one hand – what the hell, you don’t want them to get tentacle gunk all over them along with your ruined clothes – and slides the other from your hair down to your throat, digging his claws in lightly and making you gasp. He leans in again, but instead of kissing your mouth he ghosts light kisses along your jaw, down to your neck and shoulder, and you squirm. 

“What are you doing.” 

The sharp points of his claws in your throat serve as a counterpoint to the gentleness of his lips on your skin, and are also the only reason why you aren't calling off this entire debacle. 

“This is embarrassing. _You're_ embarrassing. Do you actually think this is what acceptably constitutes a pitch tryst? If this is your take on black, I shudder to think of what you're like with your flushcrushes.”

“Those sure are a lot of words coming out of your talkgash but somehow all I'm hearing is ‘ooh, Sollux, why aren't you being rougher with me, ooh,’” he sneers right in your ear.

You don’t bother to respond, instead reaching through the faint psionics behind him. You're able to get your hand around one of the wires and jostle it _just so_ –

“ _Ow_ , thanks, Dirk, fuck you very much – ” Pain pierces his thinkpan, just as you expected it to.

“I could turn your sponge into slurry if I yanked a bunch of these out,” you murmur to him, tugging the wires gently but not moving any more of them where they’re plugged into his ports.

“Unngh, yeah right, I'd blow you to bits before you even had the chance,” he pants back at you. _But I won’t_ hangs unspoken in the air between you.

You’re thankful that the wires only really come up to his thighs, and that his suit zips up the front. You slowly inch the zipper down from neck to crotch, trying your best to keep your head and bring even a little suaveness into this gigantic trainwreck of a makeout session. He isn’t saying anything to rush you, but you can feel him fidgeting under the layer of slimy biowires, and it’s not just his claws that are digging into your skin, but his very grip on your neck is painfully tight, so tight you’re surprised his touchstub joints haven’t locked in position.

He groans as you reach down into his pants for his bulge. It’s like a swamp down there, warm and sticky-wet.

Like some kind of pornographic magic trick, you go to pull out one bulge, but end up with two. 

“Just how far does this bifurcation thing go with you?” you ask, running your hand up his bulges and back down to rub the soft flesh between them. They’re both on the thinner side, but there’s still _two_ of them. You think about taking them both in your nook at once, and swallow.

“Pretty fucking far,” he mutters back, stuttering a little as you move your hand even further down, maneuvering your touchstubs under the remaining fabric to get at his nook. He has two of them, as well, one directly under each bulge. You carefully cup him, minding your claws, pressing the undersides of your fingers against both sets of lips. No wonder it’s so fucking wet down there, he’s literally leaking twice the juice. He squirms even harder at your movements, but he's incapable of properly moving due to the tentaclewires surrounding him. 

Like his bulges, his nooks feel smaller to accommodate for the doubling up, and you really, really, want to put your bulge in one of them. 

“Get your pants down,” he huffs in your ear, and surrounds your crotch with his psi, popping the button and shoving your pants down. Your bulge is already out, it’s been coiling uncomfortably in your underwear for the last few minutes, and it twitches as it’s exposed to the cool air of the helmsblock.

“Lift me up,” you say.

“What?”

“Lift me up with your psi so you can fuck me, c’mon.” 

He does, and you put an arm around his shoulders to keep balance. His bulges make you feel as full as you imagined. You end up hitching one leg over his hip to pull yourself closer and fuck yourself down on him even harder, your own, longer bulge curling between you and twisting down to get at one of his nooks, pressing into the warmth. There’s little he can do except hold you and touch you with his psi.

You kiss him again, and he adjusts and readjusts his grip on your neck, you can feel the blood pooling at your clavicle and the pain from it is exquisite, if not nearly enough. 

He feels amazing in your nook, but having only half of your bulge inside him with his other nook left empty just isn’t cutting it when you want him to come first, when you want to overwhelm him and make him expose even more of his vulnerabilities to you.

“This isn’t working.” You start to pull out.

He stops moaning and exclaims, “What do you mean it isn’t working, Dirk, if you stop now I’ll – “ 

“Who said anything about stopping?”

You lift yourself off him and he makes this needy, awful whine that definitely isn’t hot at all, and at this much more reasonable angle you can slide all the way inside him.

It’s not enough. You’re buried to the root in Sollux’s nook and you want more, you want to flay him open and reach inside him and make his nerves sing, you want to know everything there is to know about him, you want to hurt him the way no one else can, the way no one else will, because you won’t let them.

You bring your hands down his sides to his grub scars – if he’s not going to give you more than a few claw pricks, you’ll make him, so you dig your own claws into the sensitive flesh and scratch down. He shrieks, and the psi surrounding you burns hotter against you until your skin feels raw with it. 

“Fuck you, you’re awful, I hate you so fucking much – ”

You can feel yourself flushing with embarrassment at his unbridled honesty. What does this guy think he's doing, being inappropriately blunt and making you fucking blush like an adolescent soft and new from their first molt? 

He catches himself and looks almost as embarrassed as you. 

“Why the fuck did I say that, it's way too soon, forget you heard anything – ”

“Shut up,” you say, curtly. “The only thing worse than blabbing mistimed hate confessions is tryin’ to go back on them.”

You hold his bulges in the hand that’s not at his side, feel them curl around you, in and out between your fingers as you thrust into him, flicking your bulge inside him on every stroke. 

Your faces are in each other’s necks. You’re both close, he’s almost sobbing with it and it’s all you can do to not go off right then, not before him. 

“I hate you too,” you whisper in his ear, “I hate you too, Sollux, I didn’t plan on telling you in the middle of screwing you in the helmscolumn, but you seem to be determined to make this thing between us as laughably terrible as possible.”

You thrust in again, hard, at the same time biting down on his neck, and he comes like a firecracker, the rhythmic clenches of his nook sending you over the edge as well. 

The psionics around you fade and your feet meet the knot of the tentaclewires again. You rest your head against his shoulder and just breathe for a while. 

“You used me as a bucket. Oh my god, I can’t believe you, you asshat.” 

You huff a laugh. “You dunked me in biowire juice and then came all over my clothes, I think we’ve even.” It’s true, you’re a mess, his come all down your front and light pink stains all down your back, blood all over your neck and mouth. 

“We should. Actually finish this properly,” you say, looking up at the wires for his arm-ports hanging above you, ready and waiting. 

He sighs against your cheek. 

“Like this? Great idea, let me just zip back up and act like I don’t have a pail full of your slurry in my seedflap right now – ”

“If I recall correctly, I wasn’t the one who started making out with you after talking about how you couldn’t wait to become the ship’s engine – ”

The two of you argue back and forth as you pull your pants back up and see about getting your slurry out of the helmscolumn. You wouldn’t have pictured kicking off your new appointment as the Mothership’s engineer by fucking your new kismesis in the aforementioned ship’s helmsblock, but you have absolutely no complaints.


End file.
